In fact, lots of us were on fire yesterday for the global event, Stoos Connect, aka World Stoos Day. With a sold-out gathering in Amsterdam, twenty-two satellite sites around the world, and around twenty speakers, including Dan Pink, Roger Martin, Lisa Earle McLeod, Franz Röösli and Joe Justice, the event was rather amazing.

Videos of the talks are expected to be available on-line shortly. My talk, entitled Towards The Tipping Point In Leadership & Management, was given towards the end of the day, and went like this:

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After all the wonderful talks that we have heard so far, what can I add? What I plan to do is look back and see where we have come from and suggest five guideposts for the future.

Looking back to those days in late 2011 when just four of us—Peter Stevens, Jurgen Appelo, Franz Röösli and I—were sitting around having drinks and talking about the crazy idea of catalyzing a global movement to transform management, we have come a long way.

Four people grew to be twenty-one in just a few weeks. Now the twenty-one have grown to be over 1,500 in just a year. If you do the math, at this rate, by 2016, we will have the entire world population in the Stoos movement!

So it’s been a good year.

It’s also been a good year in terms of substance. During the year, we saw some of the main pillars of 20th century management starting to crumble and even collapse.

So although we’re not yet at the tipping point, during the year there were important substantive signs that we are getting there.

A growing recognition that this is a paradigm shift

There was also a growing awareness that the shift is not merely about adopting some new tools or processes. It’s a shift in the management paradigm. Once people make this shift in mindset, everything is different.

So I was somewhat uneasy earlier in the day with the idea expressed by my good friend, Roger Martin, that stewardship is about tweaking. He gave the example of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law as an example of a big shift that hasn’t worked, and he suggested that we should shy away from big shifts and instead proceed by tweaking.

Now I agree with Roger that the Dodd Frank law hasn’t worked. But that’s not because it is a big shift. That’s because it’s a continuation of the command and control mindset. The law itself is 848 pages and the regulations may amount to 30,000 pages of rules, controls and inspections. That can never work. That’s because it’s driven by the obsolete mindset of 20th Century bureaucratic thinking.

By contrast, the idea of management conceived as stewardship of the living isa big, fundamental shift. It’s different. It’s a paradigm shift.

The shift is as transformational as the shift from the medieval view that the sun revolves around the earth to the view that earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. It is a fundamental transition in worldview. You can’t get from the medieval view of the universe as the sun revolving around the earth to the mindset of the earth revolving around the sun just by tweaking. You have to look at the world differently.

There are wrenching and abrupt differences between the two worldviews.

Neither can you get from a mindset of command-and-control of the machine to stewardship of the living by tweaking. The shift is a radical one. They are two different worldviews.

The paradigm shift at GE Health

What I would agree with Roger is this: once we have made the mental shift, then we have to think through the practical step-by-step plan of action: what do we actually do with organizations that are being run on obsolete assumptions, attitudes and values?

How do we make this big change happen in a large organization, say, like General Electric? In parts of GE, like GE Health, you already have a large number of people, who have put in place this paradigm shift with Agile values and practices, even though the overall organization is still being run in the old way at the top.

So there is an epic struggle now under way between the obsolete practices of GE at the top of the organization and the Agile practices being pursued within GE Health. The struggle is being played out in a series of small steps that you might perhaps call “tweaking”, although I think that “guerilla warfare” would be a more accurate description. I’m not sure that the folks in GE Health would see themselves as a group of “tweakers”. In fact, they call themselves “a giant sleeper cell of revolutionaries”. They see themselves involved in a fight for the soul of GE. The war is being fought in a series of small steps. But the goal is big, bold radical change.

So however we describe it, I agree with Roger that getting from here to there in real organizations is going to take place in a series of small steps. But the shift in mindset is a fundamentally different worldview.

So what’s next for Stoos? I see five guideposts for the future.

1. We need to recognize the extent of the challenge

The sad thing, as Niels Pflaeging pointed out earlier in the day, is that almost all the ideas that all the wonderful speakers have been talking about here aren’t new.

People have talking about this paradigm shift for almost a century, ever since Mary Parker Follett started giving lecturs about it at Harvard and Oxford in the 1920s. She was followed by:

Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard in 1930s,

Abraham Maslow in the 1940s,

Douglas McGregor in the 1960s,

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the 1980s,

Smith and Katzenbach in the 1990s.

Richard Hackman in the 2000s

And so on. So we need to be careful about presenting the “human factor” that we are calling here “stewardship of the living” as “the next really big new thing”, when in fact this kind of thinking has been around for close to a century.

We need to recognize that “management of the machine” has proved to be a very resilient disease.

We need to see that simply articulating the goal of “stewardship of the living” won’t make it happen. It has already been articulated many times before. Dealing with this disease requires more.

2. We need to think bigger

More of what? For one thing, we need to think bigger. A movement of 1,500 people is bigger than four people, but it’s not nearly big enough to change the world.

We need to go beyond being a unique large-scale global movement on its own (already a significant accomplishment) and in addition catalyze “a movement of movements”.

Thus the Stoos movement is not alone in pushing for a shift in the leadership and management paradigm. In the coming year, we will be reaching out to other movements that share our goals

The movements may use different terminology but they have more in common with each other and Stoos than they have significant differences.

Recognizing and working together with these other movements will be the key to accelerating the transformation and getting to the tipping point.

Together, these movements constitute roughly half a million people. We need to mobilize this much larger army to push for change.

That’s one challenge for the coming year: weaving these movements into a single coalition—a giant army—that is committed to change. The process has already started and we will see more of it during the year.

3. We need to be bolder

We know that the half-million members of this army already believe in the necessity of change. We don’t have persuade them. They have already seen the future and they are on board. But they have to go beyond talking among themselves and reach out to others.

We know that the most of the thought leaders in management today also believe in the kind of change that we are talking about. So I think it’s fair to say that we have truth on our side.

For the longest time, I personally thought that, with truth on our side, and most of the world’s thought leaders backing change, the world would see that we were right and would grasp the need to improve. I and many others thought that by simply showing that we had a better way, the world would agree with us and change.

That didn’t happen. The Global 1000 went on their merry way, without paying much attention to the truth.

So we have to be bolder.

Our army of half a million has to insist on change.

We need to get beyond tweaking.

We need to mobilize this army and make its voice heard in the world.

4. This army needs to work on removing the constraints.

How would this happen? What should the army do? We could try having the army camp outside Davos next year. An army of half a million camping outside Davos would certainly get attention and attract publicity. But it wouldn’t lead to lasting change.

So how do we get lasting change?

In addition to recruiting even more participants, I believe that we need to have the army focus on removing the constraints to change.

We need to think through: what is holding the status quo in place? How could we change those constraints?

For instance, business schools. My take is that at most only 20 percent of the professors are on board with our thinking and that 80 percent of the courses are still promoting the status quo. What would it take to reverse that? What if our army was systematically and publicly evaluating the content of what the business schools are offering and point out that 80 percent of what they are teaching is obsolete and celebrating the 20 percent that are teaching 21st Century ideas?

Similarly with business journals. No more than 20 percent of Harvard Business Review is about 21st century management. Roughly 80 percent of the articles are regurgitating obsolete 20th Century ideas. What would it take to reverse that? What if our army was systematically and publicly evaluating every article in every issue of HBR and rating their articles? The result would be a wider recognition that that 80 percent of what they are publishing is obsolete and this would encourage the editors to move into the 21st Century.

Similarly with the consulting firms, and the C-Suites. What if our army could be mobilized to systematically evaluate their actions, pointing out when they were perpetuating obsolete practices and celebrating those who were moving into the 21st Century? What if the half-million members of our army were disseminating this information inside the firms in which they work, rather like the Corporate Rebels United, that Peter van der Auwera described earlier in the day?

And let’s not forget Wall Street. What if our army was providing Wall Street and pension funds and mutual funds with high quality research systematically showing that 20th Century management practices actually lose money for shareholders? Some of this material is already available. What if we disseminated more of it and did it more systematically?

We have a large army. Let’s mobilize it to help remove the constraints to change.

5. We need to evangelize the change

Finally, we need to evangelize more. We need to get beyond talking to ourselves and convince others. We know that we have better ideas. We believe that truth is on our side. But rational argument won’t get things done by itself. We have to have the confidence to believe in our ideas. It’s the strength of our belief that will make the change happen. It’s passion and energy and conviction that will drive the change.

Just think, if Martin Luther King had said, “I have a dream, but I’m not sure that people are ready for it…” Nothing would have happened.

Similarly with our ideas. If we present the ideas of Stoos like: “We have this interesting idea about stewardship of the living; it’s an idea that we think perhaps might be worth considering. That’s if you happen to have the time…,” nothing significant will happen.

Instead we need to be saying, “Goddamnit! Listen to me! This firm is going to go down the tubes unless we implement this! The choice is: change or die! Can you see that?” It’s only by talking like that, with passion and energy and belief and "the fierce urgency of now" that we will make this Stoos revolution happen.

So that’s how I see the future of Stoos over the coming year.

We need to recognize the extent of the opposition to change.

We need to be bigger: We need to be joining with other movements to form “a movement of movements”.

We need to be bolder: We already have better ideas. We need to make the voice of our army heard.

We need to pursue a practical agenda of removing the constraints to change

We need to evangelize the change with energy and passion.

If we do those things then we have a chance of making this change happen in our lifetimes, rather than in the lifetimes of our great-grandchildren.

I am not saying that this will be easy. It will often seem that the task is impossible. We will get slapped down. We will be rejected. But we must always remember the words of Margaret Mead.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”